Precarity From a Feminist Perspective: A Note on Three Elements for the Political Struggle

1. Introduction

Feminism, as a theory and as a radical practice of living and understanding the world, is relevant in the conversation about precarity for at least two reasons: first, because precarity is a gendered reality that affects differently the lives of men and women and, secondly, because, historically, feminist thinking has been concerned about changing oppressive power structures as well as constructing more equal social horizons. Following this premise, in this note I focus on three different approaches to analyzing the relation between precarity and gender and, departing from each of them, I offer some conclusions about elements that should be considered in the struggle against precarity.

My aim is to highlight the relevance of a feminist approach to the conversation about precarity because gender relations are a key aspect of any social transformation and, therefore, it is not enough to only “add women and stir,” saying that women are of course also precarious, and that they should of course join any political struggle directed to the dismantling of this reality or, even worse, to reflect about precarity without considering gender, as if this was a minor element that could be added a posteriori. On the contrary, to listen to the voices of women, and to understand their particular experience as precarious, is something that can guide our collective efforts towards a less oppressive future for everyone.

2. The Feminization of Precarity and the Sustainability of Life

The last decades of the 20th century witnessed a crucial social change regarding gender and the economic system: the so-called feminization of the labor market, meaning that an unprecedented number of women were incorporated into the labor force, seeking paid jobs, and challenging the previous notion of women as mainly devoted to domestic and care work for their nuclear families. This tendency, although more visible in countries of the Global North, has also been present in countries of the South, where women have also gained visibility as part of the working population (Elveren, Marr, and Renard 2017; International Labor Office, 2018).

The feminization of the labor market has coincided in time with the transformation of labor relations, and the increase of precarious jobs. Analyzing these two changes, authors like Standing (1999) have proposed the term feminization of precarity that, along with similar terms like the feminization of poverty, tries to highlight how globalized neoliberalism, as a force driving flexibilization and insecurity in the labor market, has had a more significant and pernicious impact on the lives of women. This differentiated impact on the positions of men and women in the global economy is the result of what in feminist economics has been called the sexual division of labor, as a substructure of gender relations characterized by both the separation between what men and women do, and by the less value associated with the activities performed by women.

In this way, the sexual division of labor actively constructs the jobs for women as inferior and, therefore, more prone to be precarious. Historically, the bodies of women have been less valued, understood as dependent on the protection of men for their vital subsistence, and as a very flexible tool to manage the crisis of capitalism by moving women’s work-bodies between the productive and reproductive spheres of the economy. In this regard, authors like Gutiérrez-Rodríguez (2014) propose the term precarity of feminization as a way to make visible how it is not that women participate in precarious jobs that precede their participation in them but, on the contrary, how every social activity culturally associated with the identity of women is automatically degraded and, therefore, precarized. This is especially visible with regard to the work of reproducing human beings and workers through domestic and care work, activities that have been historically devalued, not paid, and not even recognized by the system as having economic value.

When thinking about precarity and gender, the work of reproduction not only of workers but of life in a broader sense becomes a point of analysis that cannot be overlooked. These activities have always been necessary for sustaining the economic system and, as it has been largely discussed in feminist economics, it is not possible to understand capitalism without understanding the relations of reproduction that allowed the relations of class to emerge in the first place, with men selling their labor force while women, through their unpaid work, were in charge of the reproduction of the working-class family and, more broadly, in charge of the reproduction of society and human beings. Reproductive work has always been precarious, invisible, and generally without any kind of retribution beyond the fulfillment of an ideological normative idea of women as beings to serve others.

In recent decades, domestic and care work has become more and more commercialized, especially in the global figure of the migrant women from the Global South, who moves to countries from the North in order to perform these kinds of activities. Nevertheless, imprinted by patriarchal ideology as they are, domestic and care activities continue being among the most precarious jobs and, therefore, contributing to the idea of the feminization of precarity.

In this regard, it makes sense to understand precarity not only as an ongoing economic problem, but also as a problem of the reproduction of life, since it is related to the ways in which society organizes the sustainability of life and human beings, and the more and more scarce resources for this task, all of these having a very big impact on the lives of women, who are constantly cushioning the adverse effects of capital against human life using their own bodies, effort, work, and time in this process.

To think about the reproduction of life and its relation to women and precarity makes visible one of the elements that should be present in the political struggle toward a society organized in a nonprecarious way: it needs to consider the whole economic system, composed by the productive and reproductive spheres, and not only the productive, market-oriented aspect of the economy, as has historically been the case of sexist economics, which has rendered invisible the work of reproduction. A nonprecarious society should ensure that domestic and care work is valued, defeminized, and reorganized in a more just way, without being automatically linked to axes of oppression and exploitation.

This also means that the problem is not only precarity in the labor market because, although the discussion started there, focusing only on better jobs will leave untouched the conflicts between the productive and reproductive aspects of society, and the subordination of the latter to the first. It is, therefore, an open challenge for social scientists and activists concerned with precarity to imagine new ways of social organization in which, as some feminists economists have been saying (Pérez-Orozco 2014), the sustainability of life, and of living with dignity, is at the center of the economic system.

3. Doing Gender in a Precarious Context and the Questioning of Neoliberal Subjectivities

The second approach to the analysis of gender and precarity is what I call doing gender in a precarious context. This approach departs from the idea that the category of women and gender identities is not fixed but, on the contrary, it is contingent and depends upon a material context and also a set of cultural and ideological forces that are constantly negotiated by social subjects. In this regard, authors like De Lauretis (1987) call technologies of gender to the process of which a subject is constituted through assigning meaning to their sexualized body. Following this approach of the constituency of subjects as gendered, Weeks (2011: 10) highlights the importance of work as a matter of interpellation because “for an employee it is not merely a matter of bringing one’s gendered self to work, but of becoming gendered in and through work.”

The process of meaning-making through work, the body, and the subjectivities enabled by material conditions and social practices is what has been called doing gender (West and Zimmerman 1987) as a way to understand gender identities as something that is constructed, performed, and interpreted by social subjects in their day-to-day life, as opposed to something fixed, ahistorical, and rooted in any kind of essentialism.

The economic phenomenon of the feminization of the labor market, convergent in time with significant transformations in the working relations and the consolidation of globalized neoliberalism, also happened alongside deep changes in gender relations and identities, driven by social movements like feminism. In this regard, it is important to place feminism historically and analyze the changing relationship that it has established with work as a technology of gender. Although work has always been at the center of the feminist movement, which has advocated for the participation of women in the labor market, equal pay, valorization of the domestic and care work, and even wages for these types of activities, the important transformations in social life that we are currently experiencing in a context of neoliberal precarity were mainly championed by the second wave of feminism, particularly the one developed in countries from the Global North.

Some authors like Mohanty (2013) have analyzed how, during the second half of the 20th century, different tendencies inside the feminist movement were being developed at the same time. Some of them were openly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist, while others, especially what has been called liberal feminism, were advocating for bigger participation of women in the system without necessarily questioning the exploiting, racialized, and imperialist character of capitalism. It is important to consider the way in which the demand for bigger participation of women in the labor market was absorbed and reshaped by the economic system, especially in a moment of crisis and the need of capital to change labor conditions and to weaken the workers’ movement. In this regard, authors like McRobbie state that:

Although the women’s movement that McRobbie is referring to was not homogeneous, the intricacies between feminist’s demands and changes in the economic system strengthened one particular understanding of the feminist claim for bigger participation of women in the labor market and, in this way, liberal feminism became hegemonic not only in the Global North but also extending its influence to countries from the Global South through different mechanisms like an international agenda and organizations focused on a bigger representation of women in the highest hierarchies of the economic and political system.

Work as a technology of gender was therefore profoundly altered, because all of these social transformations promoted the participation of women in the labor market linked to ideas of empowerment and autonomy, and, in a way, the idea of the successful, economically-active woman became a normative ideal of the liberated woman. The emerging form of capitalism that developed from the last decades of the 20th century championed women’s economic capacity and heralded them as the new, privileged subjects of the economy (McRobbie 2007).

Gender identities seem now less rigid than they were 50 years ago, when they were centered around domestic and care work, and the normative ideal of women as loving mothers and wives. However, these changes and the apparent new opportunities for women to processes of individualization and success are happening in a context of widespread precarity, in which it is more and more difficult to survive and fulfill the fantasy of success and of having a job that is rewarding, interesting, and that provides enough source of income to access to certain lifestyles. Nevertheless, this fantasy and class aspiration works as a technology of gender that promotes new ways of doing gender, ways in which precarity is lived not only as a material condition but also as a lived, embodied experience, in which women negotiate their subjectivities through painful contradictions and deep affects and attachments to their work, as precarious as this is.

The subject of precarity and subjectivities has been widely explored in the literature about precarity from a sociological perspective. The subjective structure of the precarious worker includes characteristics like the performance of employability, the constant investment in the self as human capital, intense competition, and weak attachments to social communities, among others. Although these changes in the subjectivities of the precarious workers are for both men and women, it is important to note that, for women, they are also intertwined with specific ways of doing gender and expressing femininity in a capitalist system that presents itself as celebrating women’s empowerment, as long as this empowerment can be assimilated into capitalist’s patterns of production and consumption.

These ways of doing gender in a context of precarious jobs, and of women’s attachments and feelings like passion or love to their productive activities are aspirational and constitute an ideal figure, somehow replacing the also middle-class aspiration of the housewife during the 20th century and, in this way, expanding its influence to middle-class women from the Global North and South, and also to every working women that can relate to the idea of economic participation in the labor market as a way to escape the constrictions of patriarchal dominance, as Fraser explains:

To reflect on how deep and powerful are affects and attachments to work opens another necessary dimension of the political mobilizations against precarity: we need to consider these subjectivities, and how the ideology of work as its own reward is an obstacle for collective organization. The constant message, especially for young women, that having a job you love is the only way to have a valuable life in society and to be an autonomous women, is a conservative ideology that prevents any questioning of the economic system, and that promotes the idea that it does not matter that your job is precarious, that you are not being paid enough, or that you do not have any rights apart from a meager salary because, at the end, what does it matter as long as you are doing something you love, and as long as you can be considered an empowered woman, with your own interests and abilities?

From this analysis it is possible to extract two clues for the political resistance against precarity. The first one is that it is necessary to dismantle this ideology by exposing it and, in doing so, it is important to create a process of recollectivization that would allow to critically interrogate experiences that are perceived as individual. Politicizing the experiences of women would imply the questioning of models of meritocracy and individualism, and move toward societies in which work is deglamourized and repoliticized.

The second clue implies a challenge particularly to feminist movements and theorizations. In this regard, it is important to establish a critical distance from liberal understandings of feminism and to construct new social horizons in which women’s empowerment, freedom, and autonomy are disentangled from their participation in productive activities in a capitalist system. This is relevant with regard to the discussion about precarity because the same old messages about the solution to the feminization of precarity lying on the incorporation of women to the labor market and their access to better positions in it are not enough or accurate. These kinds of ideas obscure how these better jobs are available only to few percentages of highly privileged women and how, in a capitalist system, it is simply not possible to fulfill the promise of emancipation to all women. Feminist discussions about work are increasingly important and, in this regard, the questioning of work as a technology of gender should play a major role. In doing this, feminists’ imaginations need to move beyond individual narratives of the successful woman and offer the possibilities of a social horizon in which the feminist struggle is directed toward better material conditions to all women, and also toward societies in which work is only a means and not an end in itself, and in which, as Weeks (2011: 12) explains: “there might be a variety of ways to experience the pleasure that we may now find in work, as well as other pleasures that we may want to discover, cultivate and enjoy.”

4. Precarity From the Global South and the Power of Intersectionality

Departing from the seminal work of Crenshaw (1994) in dialog with the writing of black women, the category of intersectionality originally designated the way in which the lived experiences of black women were very specific since they were not only women, and not only black, but both of these at the same time, being therefore in a more vulnerable position compared to either black men and white women, but also with a different understanding of gender and race identities, both axes that configure a particular experience of being in the world.

From then on, intersectionality became more important in gender studies and feminist theory, for a number of reasons. As Lewis (2013) asserts, this concept has traveled from legal studies to other disciplinary fields like sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, among others. Although intersectionality has also been critically interrogated (Davis 2008), there is some agreement that this theoretical and methodological approach has allowed the recognition of differences among women, not only as adding adjectives (being woman, plus being black, plus being working class, and so on) but, on the contrary, as an understanding that the category of woman has a different meaning and designates a different lived experience for different women, because gender relations are never constructed and performed in isolation: they are always interacting with other axes of oppression like race, ethnicity, class, geographical belonging, among others.

This emphasis on social differences does not attempt to make impossible any generalization or theory about social structures; it calls, instead, for a recognition of how different systems of oppression interact and give rise to different ways of doing gender. In this way, intersectionality advocates for a recognition of differences not only in order to have a more nuanced understanding of social reality, but also to have a more accurate comprehension of how power relations and hierarchies are constructed and sustained in society.

When it comes to the analysis of precarity from an intersectional perspective, the first question that should be asked is how to grasp these differences in social experiences in a concept like precarity? In this regard, it would be useful to understand precarity less from a dichotomous perspective in which a clear line can be drawn separating precarious jobs from non-precarious ones, and more from a complex reality and lived experience in which precarity is understood like a continuum.

The material and living condition of precarity has become more common in a global scale, affecting also groups and populations that previously were in a more privileged, non-precarious situation through the protection received by the welfare state, for example inhabitants from the Global North, and from the middle and upper class in those countries. Nevertheless, despite the generalization of this condition, this does not mean that it has the same characteristics and that everyone living in a precarious situation experiences it in the same way. Intersectionality is then useful to interrogate these differences, and to conceptually link the process of precarization of nowadays to historical processes of Othering and unequal distribution of power and resources like racism, imperialism, and colonialism.

The differences in historical processes constructing and sustaining precarity have been an issue considered in the critiques to the concept of precarity made by authors like Barchiesi (2017), Munck (2013), Scully (2016), and Vij (2019). Although these authors do not use the concept of intersectionality, their critiques resonate with this approach since they question the use of the category of precarity as designating a new reality when, for the majority of the world population, working and living in precarious contexts has been the norm under a capitalist regime that has used racial and gender differences as a way to construct some bodies as disposable, and not worthy of any kind of protection. In this way, precarity is deeply connected to processes of colonialism and the different role of racialized bodies in capitalism.

The call of these authors to consider these differences in order not to reproduce power relations in the construction of knowledge by erasing the concrete realities from geopolitical spaces like the Global South, converges with issues raised by the intersectional theory in social sciences about the erasure of divergent experiences of marginalized social subjects like black women. In this regard, when thinking about precarity it would be more fruitful to analyze how different systems of oppression interact to articulate particular social experiences and, although it is possible to say that precarity has become a reality for most of the working population under globalized neoliberalism, it is not possible to say that this precarity means the same for all social subjects.

The intersectional approach, therefore, is crucial not only to have a more accurate understanding of precarity, but also to provide some important clues to the political struggle aimed to transform this reality. The first clue is that it is not possible to dismantle precarity by focusing only on one system of oppression like capitalism, or patriarchy, or racism because, in doing so, there would always be a group in the margins that would end up embodying the most precarious conditions. An example of this that is connected to what I presented in the previous section would be the incorporation of some women to the highest positions of the labor market, thanks, in part, to the feminists’ struggles against gender discrimination, but this incorporation of a minority of women in these positions left outside women who became even more precarious in the neoliberal context, for example black women, indigenous women, migrant women, among others.

Differences among women are worthy of exploration because these have a history and genealogy inside the feminist movement and because, while one strand of feminism champions women participation in the capitalist system as a way to empowerment, other strands of feminism, among them intersectional feminism, advocate for a feminism that needs to grasp and fight against all systems of oppression, as these interact, constitute, and strengthen each other. An intersectional methodology then calls for “systemic critiques of oppression... and exploitation as collective, systematic processes and institutions of rule that are gendered and raced” (Mohanty 2013).

Intersectionality is also useful in the debate about the political subject of precarity and the collective struggle that can depart from it. The idea that we are all precarious prevents better understandings of how this reality can be transformed outside liberal political frames. This concern has been shared by feminist groups like Precarias a la deriva (2004: 17), who propose that the struggle against precarity should be collective but consider, at the same time, that “our situations are so diverse, so singular, that it is difficult for us to find common denominators from which to depart or clear differences with which to mutually enrich ourselves.”

This is, again, a call for an intersectional approach in which differences are not only acknowledged, but in which we can understand that historically precarious subjects like the inhabitants of the Global South, and especially women from these territories, are not only in a different situation but also that, because they have historically embodied precarity, they have been able to develop their own dynamics and resources to survive, in which, as Vij (2019: 13) explains “social inter-dependence and the contingencies this entails are recognized as the conditions of possibility of life itself.” This means that only an intersectional analysis of precarity would allow us to understand the nuances of this reality but, perhaps more importantly, the set of cultural, communitarian, spiritual, and social practices that less privileged social groups have deployed to have less precarious and more livable lives; these knowledges have the power to provide social horizons and political tools against neoliberal existences and, therefore, they must not be overlooked.